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The luxurious enhancement of this drawing, with pen and ink and opaque white watercolor on an embellished ground, suggests that it was made as an autonomous work rather than as a preparatory study for a painting. It was probably made to be given or sold to collectors.
The drawing depicts a profane subject: the encounter of a pair of lovers who sit beside a small fountain from which water flows into a streamlet. Their horse is tethered to the splintered trunk of a tree; in the distance, behind the dense wood, is a castle flanked by a craggy range of mountains.
Albrecht Altdorfer
German; ca. 1480–1538
Two Lovers by a Fountain in a Landscape, ca. 1509–10
Pen and black ink and white opaque watercolor on brown
prepared paper
2006.51.